Ten Ton Hammer is the one of the latest sites to offer a new preview of Blizzard Entertainment's upcoming The Burning Crusade. The first expansion for World of Warcraft, Crusade is set to offer a treasure horde of new content for eager gamers. In addition to an increased level cap and an entirely new continent to explore, players will also benefit from the controllable flying mounts and expanded PvP options.

Level 70 players will be able to acquire flying mounts. While players are limited to the Outlands as far as actual flight, these mounts can touch down and walk along the ground too - a nice touch that will allow you to show off your lettness in the old world cities. Kaplan stated that flying mounts serve three design purposes: 1) fast travel, 2) prestige, and 3) progression. As the first is fairly self-explanatory (griffon speed!), let's go to prestige. All level 70 players will likely upgrade to the purchased level 70 flying mount just like you did at level 40, but the hardcore can also attain legendary flying mounts (Damron was sporting his "Nether Drake"). As far as the third purpose - progression - you'll need your flying mount to access certain lofty dungeons in Outlands.

Macgamestore.com has added three games to its line-up including Gates of Troy, Sudoku Pagoda, and Tank-o-Box.

Gates of Troy is available for $29.95 as a digital download and is the sequel to the award winning Spartan. Gates of Troy is an epic turn based strategy game that covers the Trojan Wars, and lets the player take control of mighty heroes such as Achilles and Hector and allows you to assault the Gates of Troy and build the Trojan horse.

Sudoku Pagoda is available for $19.95. In the game, you plunge into the mystery world of ancient Japan by playing this wonderful sudoku game. It's just what you need to relax. Your task is just like in original Sudoku to fill the board with the figures or symbols. A free demo is available for download.

Tank-o-Box is available for $19.95 and is a new electrifying shooter where you control a toy tank and battle your way through 50 game levels. Your objective is to secure your base against hostile forces in the tank battles on the writing desk between children's sketches and crayons. A free universal binary demo is available on the web site for download.

On Tuesday, IMG held a chat with Aspyr's Glenda Adams. The crowd in the chat room asked Glenda several interesting questions about Aspyr, The Gamerhood, Apple's Mac Pro, Cider, and much more. A transcript of the event, in case you missed it, is available by following the link below.

In a new column Macworld's Peter Cohen examines the impact of virtualization software on Mac gaming. These programs allow Intel Mac owners to run Windows applications without rebooting. Cohen discusses the current hopefuls in the virtualization market, including Parallels and TransGaming.

Cider is perhaps the most intriguing of the bunch. An outgrowth of TransGaming’s Cedega software for Linux, Cider is a distant descendant of WINE as well. What makes Cider different from Parallels and CrossOver is that it doesn’t attempt to reproduce a complete environment from which to run Windows. Instead, it “wraps” Windows-compatible games and is optimized to help those games to run Mac OS X. So TransGaming will tweak Cider each time for each different game, and your experience as a gamer is the same as if the “Ciderized” game had been ported to the Mac directly — you drag it from the installer disc to your Mac and double-click on an icon, then the game runs.

There’s a lot of healthy skepticism floating around the Mac game community about Cider. TransGaming’s record is spotty—its previous Macintosh game conversions (actual Mac binaries, as opposed to “Cider-wrapped” versions of PC games) weren’t terribly well-received, were late to market, and had some technical problems. And Cedega, which TransGaming sells to Linux users on a subscription basis, hasn’t exactly set the gaming world on fire. Questions have also surfaced about Cider’s ability to translate the complex graphics subroutines used by games that make use of Microsoft DirectX 9 technology.